Understanding and using technological affordances: a response to Boyle and Cook

Abstract

Reply by the current authors to the comments made by Boyle and Cook (see record 2005-06934-008) on the original article discussing technological affordances. We would like to begin by thanking Boyle and Cook on their detailed and insightful comments on our paper. In this article we attempt to address the issues they have raised. We would agree that the concept of affordances is 'potentially rich and provocative' which is why we wanted to explore its application in terms of providing a richer understanding of the nature of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the ways in which they might be harnessed to support the development of pedagogically effective design of learning activities. Boyle and Cook provide a valuable review of the origin of the concept of affordances from the original definition development by Gibson (Gibson, 1977, 1979) and the subsequent critiques by Norman (Norman, 1998) and McGrenere and Ho (McGrenere & Ho, 2000) which we did not have time to discuss in the substance of our paper. We agree that McGrenere and Ho provide a useful clarification of the mis-use of the term and in particular think their idea of affordances as a framework for design, moving beyond Gibson's notion of affordances as binary (either there or no) to a concept of degrees of an affordance.